Journal of Technology Informatics and Engineering
Vol. 5 No. 1 (2026): APRIL | JTIE : Journal of Technology Informatics and Engineering

Cross-Dataset Parcel Workload Priors for Last-Mile Capacity Forecasting: Integrating Package Segmentation with Delivery Operation Signals

Ruiyan Ma (Software Engineering, UC Irvine, CA, USA)
Long Zhang (Transportation Systems Engineering, Southern Methodist University, TX, USA)
Annie Bai (Data Science, Columbia University, NY, USA)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Apr 2026

Abstract

This paper evaluates a cross-dataset framework for parcel segmentation, next-day last-mile operational-intensity forecasting, and capacity-oriented error analysis. The operational study uses 4,514,661 delivery tasks and 6,136,147 pickup tasks from LaDe-D and LaDe-P across five cities (May–October 2022), while the visual study uses 2,197 Package Segmentation images with 7,643 annotated package instances. A segmentation model estimates package count, foreground area, and instance-area dispersion to construct an additive workload descriptor. Because the images are not paired with operational records, city-day visual variables are represented as cross-dataset distributional proxies derived from empirical-rank mapping. Segmentation baselines are evaluated independently of forecasting. The random-forest pixel classifier achieves the best segmentation performance (IoU 0.5323, Dice 0.6450), outperforming YOLO11n-seg (IoU 0.3439, Dice 0.4591). Operational intensity is represented by the first principal component of delivery orders, active couriers, areas of interest, regions, and area types, explaining 89.19% of training variance. On a 230 city-day chronological holdout, ElasticNet Operational achieves the best forecasting accuracy (MAE 2.0521). Within XGBoost models, Vision-Prior records MAE 2.4988, slightly outperforming Delivery+Pickup (MAE 2.5154) and a shuffled-prior control (MAE 2.5973). However, the 0.0166 MAE improvement is not statistically significant under a paired moving-block bootstrap (95% CI: −0.0558 to 0.0319). A separate analysis of 6,112 Amazon routes and 1,457,175 packages similarly shows only a 0.24% MAE reduction from parcel-mix features. Overall, the proposed proxy provides only limited gains, while the operational ElasticNet remains the strongest baseline. Time- and location-paired visual observations are needed to establish practical operational benefits from computer vision.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

jtie

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Power Engineering Telecommunication Engineering Computer Engineering Control and Computer Systems Electronics Information technology Informatics Data and Software engineering Biomedical ...